Study Guide Michelle Mohabeer Spotlight Series
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre STUDY GUIDE MICHELLE MOHABEER SPOTLIGHT SERIES CONTENTS MICHELLE MOHABEER’S TRANSFORMATIONAL AESTHETICS Reading Michelle Mohabeer’s commentaries on her own films, one senses a recog- Essay 1 nizable reticence to be too reductively framed by the race-gender-sexuality politics References 3 that inspired and generated so much artistic creation around identity in the 1980s Questions 4 and early 1990s, and to which she herself contributed. Indeed, her first film, Filmography 4 EXPOSURE (1990) constituted an important contribution to the National Film Board’s About the Filmmaker 4 Five Feminist Minutes program out of the women’s Studio D, and EXPOSURE was About the Author 5 recently characterized as “the first NFB lesbian documentary in terms of both public authorial identity and explicit subject matter” (Waugh 155). Structured CREDITS 5 around a living-room conversation between writers Mona Oikawa and Leleti Tamu, contrasts and convergences between Japanese Canadian and Black communities are shared, and more particularly, lesbian community affiliations emerge through the evocation of the literatures (Audre Lord, Makeda Silvera), artworks (Grace Channer, Sharon Fernandez, Stephanie Martin) and music of women of colour (Ahdri Zhina Mandiela) that are woven through this short eight-minute film. Notwithstanding the pressures of such an auspicious career launch and moniker, what emerges from Mohabeer’s broader reflections is her desire for her films to be considered for their poetics, their experimental aural and visual strategies—what she has described as a “hybrid-pastiche blurring of experimental documentary and narrative forms” (Cooper 45). Indeed, in Mohabeer’s films, form and content are inextricable one from the other. Like the transformational film aesthetics of third cinema (Gabriel), the Black British/Caribbean film and video of the 1980s and 1990s (Fusco; Mercer), or the hybrid experimental documentary of Asian American filmmakers (Xing; Trinh), striving for a “hybrid-pastiche blurring” of film form means blending archival and memory traces, political consciousness with poetics and performance, all of which are at the heart of Mohabeer’s films, which she describes as “carving a filmic space and temporality for the liberation of the poetic post-colonial imaginary” (Cooper 45). Mohabeer has cited, amongst others, Nobel laureate writer Toni Morrison’s Beloved and French novelist and filmmaker Marguerite Duras (especially India Song [1975]) as kindred artists, both iconoclastic women trailblazers in their own right, providing interesting trajectories for Mohabeer’s own aesthetic aspirations. One can discern the slow time, temporal dissonances and memory plays that are a Duras signature in Mohabeer’s exquisite Child-Play (1997), a surreal work that incorporates the narrative experimentations of magic realism. Situated in a “composite” Caribbean setting and centered on troubling memories of childhood abuse as an allegory for the colonial experience (that concludes with an empowered http://www.cfmdc.org/home.php Page 1 of 5 STUDY GUIDE MICHELLE MOHABEER SPOTLIGHT SERIES exorcism), it is exemplary of such temporal shadings; complex layering of (post)colonial time and space are carefully crafted through dialogue, visual flash- backs and a parallel time separated by 50 years, achieving a uniquely haunted filmic dreamscape. In Coconut/Cane and Cutlass (1994), a sensuous anti-colonial meditation structured around a “return” to her birthplace of Guyana, the use of front projection, a second moving image contained within a theatrical mise-en-scène, enables hybrid, multiple forms of simultaneous storytelling. Projections of sugar cane fields, a botanical garden and flowers in Coconut... become screens for memory, desire, and sanctuary, as women’s bodies mingle undistracted in sensual pleasures amid visually opulent and plush surroundings. Resonances here are discernable in the later lush lovemaking scenes in gold and burgundy surroundings in Patricia Rozema’s When Night is Falling (1995) and Deepa Mehta’s Fire (1996). Coconut... won an honorable mention award at the Turin Lesbian/Gay Film Festival, in which they singled out the sex scene as “not to be missed for its rich evocative sensuality and the confluences of colonialism.” Complex temporal and spatial representations resound through original sound and music tracks, animating and expanding those themes of diasporic cultures and cultural mixes that run through the films. The snappy Echoes (2003) creates such blended atmospherics, sampling music from UK-based Ms. Dynamite and the Argentinean Gotan Project, as well as Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop.” The opening visual sequence incorporates Howard Hughes’ The Outlaw (1946), with Jane Russell as a Mexican woman who fends off the advances of “Billy the Kid,” all of which combine laconic humour with sparse ruminations to narrate her own capsule sexual auto-biography, from her first awakenings when the “inkling of a dyke identity emerged.” Original musical collaborations—in Coconut..., with Chinese Canadian experimental pianist Lee Pui Ming (with tabla accompaniment by Ravi Naimpally of the Toronto Tabla Ensemble) and, in Child-Play, with Donald Quan of Q Music (with bata percussions by Rick Lazar and Martin Chonsky and the Afro-Cuban, Yoruba-influenced chants/vocals of Cuban singer, Ileana Abuicablo)—are extraordinary, and amplify the rich cultural reference points and cross-pollination that are so much a textural richness of these films. Vibrant, thick green Guyanese landscapes, full-petaled water lilies and large-leafed vegetation, alchemical transformations as smoke floats down a mysterious peaked mountain, purifying flowing ocean waters beachside: such images in these films create a mythic time, slow time, downtime, languid time, time to think, time to feel, to transform... Traces of Soul (2001), like an affirmative prayer for eroticism and sensuality, integrates poetic inspirations in textual form, as words—such as “transitory,” “union,” “sometimes the soul surrenders”—are graphically wrapped around posed, languorous, naked women’s bodies elongated peacefully across wet verdure, stones and moving water; a woman’s foot is gently bathed and caressed. With its combination of original music by Haig Ghanaian (with vocals by Mohabeer), and samples from Thievery Corporation’s “Reign Dub” (and their samples from Latin America, India, Persian, Jamaican and African world music), one is trans- http://www.cfmdc.org/home.php Page 2 of 5 STUDY GUIDE MICHELLE MOHABEER SPOTLIGHT SERIES ported into an ambient tranquility. As Mohabeer has herself described her films: “The impulse behind my work is that of a transformational aesthetic where healing on many levels is evoked through the imagery, style and creative treatment of my subjects. It is my intention as a filmmaker to reach or strike a chord in my audience on a level where they can engage with the work and come away with a thread of something... that stays with them and may prompt them to alter a way of thinking and relating” (Cooper 61). Monika Kin Gagnon REFERENCES Cooper, Tamara. “Michelle Mohabeer: A Transformational Aesthetic.” Queering Canada. Eds. Donna Quince and José Sanchez. Ottawa: Making Scenes, 2000. 42-61. Fusco, Coco. “A Black Avant-Garde? Notes on Black Audio Film Collective and Sankofa.” English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. New York: The New Press, 1995. 133-144. Gabriel, Teshome H. Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982. Mercer, Kobena. “Diasporic Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain.” Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1994. 53-68. Redding, Judith M. and Victoria A. Brownworth, eds. “Michelle Mohabeer: The Politics of Identity, Part Two.” Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors. Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1997. 104-108. Trinh T. Minh-ha. Framer Framed. New York: Routledge, 1992. Waugh, Thomas. The Romance of Transgression in Canada. Montreal: McGill Queens Press, 2006. Xing, Jun. “Hybrid Cinema by Asian American Women.” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism. Eds. D. Hamamoto and Sandra Liu. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000. 186-202. http://www.cfmdc.org/home.php Page 3 of 5 STUDY GUIDE MICHELLE MOHABEER SPOTLIGHT SERIES QUESTIONS 1. Mohabeer’s earlier films are characterized by explicit explorations of cultural and erotic tensions. What purpose does this serve in the artist’s films? What is she asking us to think about in terms of the relationships between culture, sexuality, and diaspora? How are these ideas indicative of the political context in which they were produced? Why are these arguments still relevant in a contemporary context? 2. Monika Kin Gagnon states, “in Mohabeer’s films, form and content are inextricable one from the other.” What does she mean by this? How are Mohabeer’s formal and thematic goals similar? 3. These films draw explicitly on the tension between personal narrative and ethnographic practice. What might Mohabeer be attempting to accomplish in refusing to succumb to a sole reliance on either mode of inquiry? 4. Mohabeer’s films are characterized by a quiet poeticism. How is Mohabeer’s focus on “natural” landscapes used to this end? Locate and explain the signifi- cance of three examples of the filmmaker’s use of landscape in developing the rhythm and tone of her films. 5. Mohabeer has said her films